---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 11:31:44 -0800
From: Ken Weiss <ken.weiss@UCOP.EDU>
Subject: [UPS] Re: academic press policy

At 6:09 PM +0000 3/8/00, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>This specific AP policy has been discussed in this Forum before, so I
>will merely summarize.
>
>(1) The distinction between a "personal server" and an "organized
>preprint server" is completely incoherent, practically, logically, and
>legally. (The last time this AP policy was discussed in this Forum, the
>distinction was between "personal" and "public" servers: equally
>nonsensical; this new wording does not save the distinction, which
>continues to be incoherent.)
>

I agree with Stevan's assessment that once a paper is placed on any
web server accessible by the public and open to search engine robots,
the genie is out of the bottle, the worms are out of the can, the
horse is out of the barn, and there's no getting it back in there.

My concern with including links to 'personal' servers on an eprint
site is technical. Those links need to be maintained. By allowing an
'abstract + link' model (absent a robust and widely adopted solution
for creating and resolving persistent identifiers), we greatly
increase the likelihood of broken links on the preprint server. I see
'404 Document Not Found' often enough already...

>(3) And, yes, the Santa Fe protocol and the Open Archives Initiative
><http://www.openarchives.org/> are definitely relevant, because they
>will make university authors' "personal" archives completely
>interoperable, so their contents will be searchable and retrievable
>exactly as if they were all in one big archive.

I'm not convinced that we've given enough thought to the implications
of a large number of small author-managed repositories with regard to
the issues of access, availability and persistency of scholarly
publications. It's very cheap and easy to set up a server. It's much
more difficult and costly to keep it running over the long haul, with
good security, reliability, performance, and consistency.

--Ken

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